If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Running The Native ZFS Linux Kernel Module, Plus Benchmarks

Phoronix: Running The Native ZFS Linux Kernel Module, Plus Benchmarks

In August we delivered the news that Linux was soon to receive a native ZFS Linux kernel module. The Sun (now Oracle) ZFS file-system has long been sought after for Linux, though less now since Btrfs has emerged, but incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL licenses have barred such support from entering the mainline Linux kernel. There has been ZFS-FUSE to run the ZFS file-system in user-space, but it comes with slow performance. There has also been work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in porting ZFS to Linux as a native Linux kernel module. This LLNL ZFS work though is incomplete but still progressing due to a US Department of Energy contract. It is though via this work that developers in India at KQ Infotech have made working a Linux kernel module for ZFS. In this article are some new details on KQ Infotech's ZFS kernel module and our results from testing out the ZFS file-system on Linux.

Yeah, it's great. ZFS is for Enterprise servers - people dont get it. There are lot of complaints that you can not run ZFS on 128MB RAM machines or less RAM. And that ZFS is slow. And that...

Who the heck cares if you can not run Enterprise stuff on 128MB RAM machines? Who the heck cares how slow ZFS is on a single drive, when it protects your data - whereas other filesystems might corrupt your data? etc.

I would love to see Enterprise benchmarks, then ZFS would shine and the Linux solutions would fail miserably.

1) Data safety. ZFS wins. Linux filesystems are bad on this aspect. Confirmed by computer scientists in research papers
2) Speed. Use 48 drives or more, and ZFS will crush easily. I doubt even Linux can use that many drives to a full extent. I suspect Linux solutions will start to scale worse and worse, the more drives you add. Heck, recently ext4 architect bragged about ext4 is not crippled by 30ish(?) drives in an array any longer.
3) LARGE raids. ZFS wins. Linux fails miserably.
4) Ease of use. ZFS wins easily. Linux fails
5) etc etc etc
The list could go on. But there are no Enterprise benchmarks here on Phoronix. People see that ZFS is slow on one drive, and people draws the conclusion that ZFS is slow and can not give ridiculous performance.

These test just reinforce one question in my mind, "Why aren't more people using XFS?". I switched to XFS from ReiserFS when it became deprecated. XFS is featureful, stable, and fast. Ext3 never really performed that well for me but for some reason it is the default in most distributions. Now people are going to move from Ext3 to Ext4 or Btrfs in the future but most will probably gain very little from it.

2) Speed. Use 48 drives or more, and ZFS will crush easily. I doubt even Linux can use that many drives to a full extent. I suspect Linux solutions will start to scale worse and worse, the more drives you add. Heck, recently ext4 architect bragged about ext4 is not crippled by 30ish(?) drives in an array any longer.
3) LARGE raids. ZFS wins. Linux fails miserably.